s of beauty in the literatures of foreign
tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretive, rather than
creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true originality. It
merely indicates that his inspiration came to him in the first instance
from other sources than the common life about him. He naturally began
as a translator, and this first volume contained, among other things,
exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, Salis, and Mueller, from
the Danish, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from
Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a translator, and in subtler
ways than by direct translation he infused the fine essence of European
poetry into his own. He loved

"Tales that have the rime of age
And chronicles of eld."

The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is his habit
to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his favorite Middle Ages,
even when writing of American subjects. To him the clouds are hooded
friars, that "tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds
blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn masses
for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends with the prayer--

"Kyrie, eleyson,
Christe, eleyson."

In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shadows lie upon
the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn has written his rubric on
the illuminated leaves, the wind turns them over and chants like a
friar." This in Cambridge, of a moonshiny night, on the first day of
the American October! But several of the pieces in _Voices of the
Night_ sprang more immediately from the poet's own inner experience.
The _Hymn to the Night_, the _Psalm of Life_, _The Reaper and the
Flowers_, _Footsteps of Angels_, _The Light of Stars_, and _The
Beleaguered City_ spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, patience, and
faith. In these lovely songs, and in many others of the same kind
which he afterward wrote, Longfellow touched the hearts of all his
countrymen. America is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet
of sentiment and of the domestic affections, became and remains far
more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" singer as Whitman, who
is still practically unknown to the "fierce democracy" to which he has
addressed himself. It would be hard to overestimate the influence for
good exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet morality
which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Longfellow's